Thinking through solidarity organizing, with an eye to how we can better live the change, as well as how we often slip in to colonial patterns when working together across distance and difference. Written from the perspective of a long time US and now Canada based international solidarity activist turned political geographer.

Jul 10, 2013

studies show it is harder for all to feel the pain of 'black' people

That you may already know, but a new study shows that even people of color assume that 'black' folks actually feel less pain that 'white' folks. wacky

Let’s do a quick experiment. You watch a needle pierce someone’s
skin. Do you feel this person’s pain? Does it matter if the person’s
skin is white or black?

For many people, race does matter, even if they don’t know it. They
feel more empathy when they see white skin pierced than black. This is
known as the racial empathy gap. To study it, researchers at the
University of Milano-Bicocca showed participants (all of whom were
white) video clips of a needle or an eraser touching someone’s skin.
They measured participants’ reactions through skin conductance
tests—basically whether their hands got sweaty—which reflect activity in
the pain matrix of the brain. If we see someone in pain, it triggers
the same network in our brains that’s activated when we are hurt.
But people do not respond to the pain of others equally. In this
experiment, when viewers saw white people receiving a painful stimulus,
they responded more dramatically than they did for black people.

The racial empathy gap helps explain disparities in everything from
pain management to the criminal justice system. But the problem isn’t
just that people disregard the pain of black people. It’s somehow even
worse. The problem is that the pain isn’t even felt.

A recent study shows that people, including medical personnel, assume black people feel less pain
than white people. The researchers asked participants to rate how much
pain they would feel in 18 common scenarios. The participants rated
experiences such as stubbing a toe or getting shampoo in their eyes on a
four-point scale (where 1 is “not painful” and 4 is “extremely
painful”). Then they rated how another person (a randomly assigned photo
of an experimental “target”) would feel in the same situations.
Sometimes the target was white, sometimes black. In each experiment, the
researchers found that white participants, black participants, and
nurses and nursing students assumed that blacks felt less pain than
whites.

But the researchers did not believe racial prejudice was entirely to
blame. After all, black participants also displayed an empathy gap
toward other blacks. What could possibly be the explanation for why
black people’s pain is underestimated?

It turns out assumptions about what it means to be black—in terms of
social status and hardship—may be behind the bias. In additional
experiments, the researchers studied participants’ assumptions about
adversity and privilege. The more privilege assumed of the target, the
more pain the participants perceived. Conversely, the more hardship
assumed, the less pain perceived. The researchers concluded that “the
present work finds that people assume that, relative to whites, blacks
feel less pain because they have faced more hardship.”

This gives us some insight into how racial disparities are
created—and how they are sustained. First, there is an underlying belief
that there is a single black experience of the world. Because this
belief assumes blacks are already hardened by racism, people believe
black people are less sensitive to pain. Because they are believed to be
less sensitive to pain, black people are forced to endure more pain.